ASD-100 - Air Situation Display Application

ASD-100 is Cambridge Pixel's PC-based air surveillance display application for both primary and secondary radar data. It is a complete ready-to-run Windows application for display of radar and associated information, including: radar video, tracks and safety alarms. ASD-100 is designed principally for military air surveillance and ATC applications, it runs on any modern Windows (7,8,10) PC, accepting input data from the network in open ASTERIX formats.

ASD-100 can interface to a number of different ASTERIX data inputs, including: radar video (CAT-240), track reports (CAT-48) and safety alert messages (CAT-4). All data is presented on a large, clear PPI display, overlaid on top of user-selectable maps. Cambridge Pixel's field-proven scan converter is built into ASD-100, providing a smooth, flexible and accurate display of the radar video. Up to four streams of radar video may be input and displayed simultaneously (e.g. raw primary, processed primary, MTI and secondary). In addition to the four video channels, four track receiving channels are available, allowing primary, secondary and fused tracks all to be received and displayed simultaneously.

Safety alerts such as Short Term Conflict Alerts (STCA), Area Proximity Warnings (APW) and Minimum Safe Altitude Warnings (MSAW) may be sent to ASD-100 in ASTERIX CAT-4 format, for example from Cambridge Pixel's SPx SafetyNet Server application. The application displays a prominent visual warning on the screen, for acknowledgement by the operator, as well as a graphical representation of the conflicts while they persist.

Flight plan support is built into ASD-100, allowing operators to create, edit and save flight plans into an internal database. Flight plans in the database are matched against current aircraft tracks, using their callsign or Mode 3/A code, as available. A matched flight plan is deemed to be active and the label of the corresponding track may reflect this.

The graphical user interface has been designed with modern touchscreen displays in mind. To this end, the common controls are readily accessible and operated by large buttons. Common view controls, such as pinch-to-zoom and slide-to-pan are supported. Tools available within ASD-100 allow intercept vectors to be calculated and displayed, rulers to be drawn between two reference points or targets, and individual tracks to be designated, all with simple touch controls.

Cambridge Pixel's SPx Tracking Server product supports tracking from IFF video, including extraction of the encoded SSR (IFF) information. This means that Cambridge Pixel can offer a comprehensive upgrade for legacy air defence processing and display systems, whilst retaining the existing (and expensive) front-end radar hardware. Such upgrades are predominantly software based, making them cost-effective and future-proof. Cambridge Pixel's software produces and consumes open standard ASTERIX data, meaning it is compatible with other systems using these formats. Furthermore, source code licencing is available, allowing developers to extend, localize and ensure long term support.